Bostwick: Please just describe your own experience.

Witness: So I push as hard as I can and then the door, it flies open, and I go through, I fall down, but then I get up, and there is nobody there, and I see so much flames and smoke that I think, Well, you can’t go down the stairs, but maybe you can go up the stairs, so I go up the stairs, even if it doesn’t make sense, because I think how did they get out from the offices, maybe the roof, and it’s empty, they have all saved themselves already, from the pressing and the shipping tables there is nobody left.

Bostwick: Were there other people around you? Did other girls try to follow you through this door?

Witness: I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t think anyone was right behind me, but it was all confusion and the smoke was so black and everyone was coughing and screaming and crying. And it’s all in a moment.

Bostwick: Are you aware that numerous other witnesses have testified trying the door to this stairwell but finding it locked, and nobody can recall seeing you or Mr. Jacobs at this door on the Greene Street side? Why do you suppose nobody else was able to escape the fire the way you escaped the fire?

Witness: You ask me not to talk about other people and only say my own experience. Now you ask me to say what happened to other people I didn’t even see. What do you want I should say? I am trying just to tell my own story, like you said before when I talked about my sister.

Crain: Order, order. Witness makes a good point for the defense. Please continue to limit your testimony to descriptions of your own experience, Mrs. Gottesfeld.

Witness: I seen a ladder going up to a hole in the ceiling so that was it. I go up the ladder, I see daylight like I never thought I would see again, and then, like a miracle, I am on the roof, and there are firemen up there. They order me I have to crawl across another ladder, this one goes over a big gap to another building on the Waverly Place side, and somehow I do this, with my eyes closed, because I am afraid of falling down in the space between the buildings. It’s like a nightmare, but I do it. So I go over, and people help me stand up, and then I just walked down ten flights of stairs like everything in the world is ordinary again, just for those minutes it takes me to go down the ten flights. So then I am on the street, and I see all the bodies—

Steuer: Objection.

Bostwick: Thank you, Mrs. Gottesfeld, that’s all we need to hear about at this time.

Crain: Court is in recess until two o’clock.

[Recess]

Steuer: How old is your baby, Mrs. Gottesfeld?

Witness: He is three months.